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“We Proclaim Christ Crucified,” Jeff Wright, 10/26/14

“We Proclaim Christ Crucified”
A sermon preached at
Heart of the Rockies Christian Church
(Disciples of Christ)
Fort Collins, Colorado
October 26, 2014

When you answer the questions about what happened to Jesus – this beautiful, gentle, kind, and caring man – and you tell the truth, some people walk away. They are not interested in a man who died like he did, and they are not interested in any group that centers itself around such an event. “Why can’t we just leave that part out?” they say, “Why can’t we just tell the stories about Jesus healing and touching and teaching and preaching?”
Fred B. Craddock, The Cherry Log Sermons

Texts: 1Corinthians 1:18-25 & Mark 8:27-37

Let me describe the context for our reading from Mark’s Gospel. We’re nearing the end of Jesus’ ministry. He and his disciples are camped outside the town of Caesarea Philippi, a Roman city located in what is now the Golan Heights. Here, for the first time, Jesus’ disciples begin to understand the heart of Jesus’ teaching. They understand it just enough to reject it – a common human response to something new. “No way,” Peter says, speaking for all of them. Because here at Caesarea Philippi, Jesus speaks about the way it really is in the world. He speaks about the world’s brokenness – our lives’ brokenness, yours and mine – and he describes the only way forward toward healing and reconciliation. [Read Mark 8:27-37]

The death of Jesus is a problem for thinking persons. It was a problem for Jesus’ disciples. They headed home after his crucifixion, hearts broken, hopes dashed. The disciples were just coming to believe that Jesus might actually be the One God had promised who would deliver humankind out of our brokenness, who would restore the wonder and the beauty of creation. Peter was the first to declare it openly – in our text this morning: “You’re the Messiah,” he said. But shortly after, Jesus was beaten to within an inch of his life and nailed to a post to die. This sudden, humiliating end didn’t make sense. It didn’t fit the disciples’ understanding of how God would reconcile the world and make all things new again.

The cross of Christ is a problem for a lot of people. Every other major world religion looks upon Jesus with admiration, but cannot make sense of Jesus’ crucifixion. In an Easter week article, Newsweek’s Kenneth Woodward wrote,1 “In Judaism there is no precedent for a Messiah who dies, much less as a criminal as Jesus did. In Islam, the story of Jesus’ death is rejected as an affront to Allah himself. Hindus can accept only a Jesus who passes into peaceful samadhi, a yogi who escapes the degradation of death. The figure of the crucified Christ, says Buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh, ‘is a very painful image to me. It does not contain joy or peace, and this does not do justice to Jesus.’” The article concluded, “There is… no room in other religions for a Christ who experiences the full burden of mortal existence.”

Sometimes it seems like there’s little room for Jesus’ death in the Church. Crucifixion is not only a stumbling block. It can be an embarrassment. You bring a guest to church, you don’t want the preacher talking about the one we’re modeling our lives after getting arrested by the authorities and sentenced to capital punishment… and then his having called the rest of us, if we want to discover life at its deepest and best, to pick up our cross and follow. I understand. Folks want uplifting music, an uplifting message. Something about the fruit of the Spirit, maybe: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. That’s what folks want to remember about Jesus. His patience and kindness and generosity. His loving touch. His gentleness. They want to leave church feeling good about themselves. Some churches have actually taken down the cross in their buildings.

Paul is right. Jesus’ death is a great dividing wall between a world that is largely attracted to the person of Jesus and the heart of his message. Still, Paul insists, we won’t understand God until we deal with Jesus’ crucifixion, with Jesus’ call to those of us who are attracted to him to pick up our cross and follow. A thinking person has to ask, Why?

Here’s my answer why. I don’t buy the common explanation that Jesus had to die on the cross to satisfy the wrath of an angry God. I don’t think you believe that, either, though a lot of people do. That God was sitting up in heaven, completely put out about the behavior of humankind, and decided finally to forgive us by way of putting whatever punishment we deserve for our share in the world’s indifference and sin onto his son. That’s not the God I’ve come to know in Jesus. God is credited with a lot of terrible stuff in the Old Testament. Those Old Testament stories shape many persons’ understanding about who God is. But one of the reasons God sent Jesus to live among us – another way of saying this: one of the reasons God came to live among us in Jesus – was to dispel these false images of a God who is angry all the time, takes the divine anger out on humankind. Don’t try to fit Jesus into the images you have of God from the Old Testament. That’s moving backwards. Jesus takes us forward in our understanding of who God is. Instead, take what you read in the Old Testament and see if it fits into what we’re told of Jesus in the New Testament. If it doesn’t fit, put it aside.

I think Jesus’ death was the result of God’s having finally said, “Okay. I’m coming down to be with you. We’re going to figure out this estrangement thing and resolve it together. We’ll look at the world the way is and then we’ll work together to shape it into how it’s finally going to be.” It was his working to shape the world toward wholeness, toward justice and a lasting peace that got Jesus crucified.

The cross, then, is first of all evidence – a vivid reminder – that life is broken.2 And it’s not just the meanness – the violence and indifference – on our city’s streets: drive-by shootings, parents who mistreat their children, drug and alcohol abuse. It’s also the violence and indifference in places of wealth and power. Remember, it was religious leaders and leading politicians who put Jesus to death on the cross. You may think we don’t a reminder. But life can go along pretty well for us: nice home, nice family, nice church, nice neighborhood…. We can forget and be left completely unprepared. Many people are genuinely surprised, dumbfounded, when something terrible happens. Why? Why me? Why us? The cross reminds us that bad things happen in life.
You’d think everybody knows this. But they don’t. I think there are many, a lot of Christians, who think when you do what is right, live a relatively good life, are kind and keep your head down, that you’re supposed to get rewarded, blessed, that life is supposed to go better. Not always.

And it’s not just that we’re as vulnerable to life’s threats as everybody else. There’s a further risk of suffering in our choosing to follow Jesus. When we seek to name and expose the estrangement, to confess our share in the brokenness and then work to overcome it, there’s a price. There’s a risk in living Christianly. The cross prepares us to expect that it doesn’t always go better when we join Jesus in his mission to overcome the estrangement; when we refuse to make distinctions between insiders and outsiders, saved and lost, friends and enemies, rich and poor, educated and uneducated; when we speak the truth in love or sacrifice for others or stand up for the marginalized.

The cross reminds us that there are systems and powers that run on the fuel of estrangement. These systems and powers resist transformation and reconciliation. When we resist the powers, they push back, sometimes violently. Disciples preacher Fred Craddock tells how at the National Cathedral in Washington, there are flags flying inside from all the states in the Union. The flags represent significant people from the various states. There have been three flags flown from Georgia. One was for Martin Luther King, Jr., who pastored the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. Another was for Woodrow Wilson who began his law career in Georgia. And one for Robert Alston. Alston was from Atlanta. He owned the land that is now East Lake Golf Club, the oldest golf club in Atlanta.

Alston was a member of the Georgia Legislature. He was put off by the ugliness and corruption of that body. One thing especially incensed him. It was a custom in those days for wealthy and influential people to use state prisoners to work on their mansions, to build their commercial buildings, to farm their plantations. All you had to do was provide lunch to the inmates. A lot of fine commercial buildings and nice old homes in Atlanta were built on the back of prisoners who worked all day for lunch. Robert Alston worked with his fellow legislators to try to change the practice. No one was interested. So one day he said, “Tomorrow I will introduce a bill into the legislature to make this practice against the law. It is absolutely inhumane.” The next morning he came in with his bill. A fellow legislator from one of the nice families came over to Alston and said, “Mr. Alston, are you going to introduce your bill today?” Alston replied, “Yes, I am.” The man reached inside his coat, pulled out a derringer, and shot Robert Alston dead.

A life of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control – it sounds so attractive. A good preacher will move you to aspire to it. An honest preacher will tell you it can get you crucified. The Christ-life won’t always lead to a physical death. But it can lead to the loss of reputation, wealth, job and friendships. Tell me, what has possessed those health care workers that are leaving their homes and families and heading to West Africa to care for the victims of Ebola? O.K., I can understand their going once – so laudable, their putting themselves at risk once. But many of them are returning! That’s pure foolishness – according to the wisdom of the world. According to Paul, they’re living a cruciform life, a life shaped by the cross.
You remember Jesus saying, “The gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life… (Matthew 7:13.” I think this is what was talking about, the way of the cross. When he said, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life (John 14:6).” This is the hard way, the way each of us in our own ways and circumstances are called to be reconcilers in the world, to bring healing and hope and wholeness.

This is why we preach Christ crucified and place a cross at the center of our worship space.

I don’t like it.

But I see it all over the place, what last week Melissa in her sermon described “as a pattern of action that propels us to show up even when we don’t know what we’re doing or how it could possibly make a difference. It’s love,” she said, “love as a pattern of action….”
The spouse whose trust has been broken by an affair deciding – oh, Lord knows this isn’t easy, God knows by way of the cross that it isn’t easy, but that it’s possible, by way of forgiveness and grace – to lay down what has come of one’s life, the hurt and the pain, in the hope of rebuilding a relationship, to reach a new depth of love and commitment.

The child, overlooked or discounted, maybe even abused, who grows up one day – God knows it isn’t easy, Lord knows by way of the cross that it isn’t easy, but it’s possible – to forgive a parent and even visit her in the nursing home, touch her, kiss her, feed her, nourish her. Oh my, God knows it isn’t easy. It’s the way of the cross, the only way to healing, to what Jesus called “a peace that the world cannot give (John 14:6).” Listen, we don’t have go looking for a cross. They’re lying at our feet, usually cut and hewn just for us.

You see it in one place, you start to recognize it all over the place – this cruciform way of living in which the so-called “powerlessness of grace” and the so-called “foolishness” of forgiveness defeat the wisdom of the world and the powers of darkness and death. I think of victims of the Aurora shooter – some who were wounded; others who lost loved ones – who have chosen to forgive. The shooter hasn’t even said, “I’m sorry,” hasn’t gone to trial, and they’re forgiving him. You can understand why some stumble over this Christ-like way of being, and call it naïve and foolish.

You’ve heard of the Velvet Revolution, the fall of the communist regime in Czechoslovakia in 1989. A poet and playwright, Vaclav Havel was imprisoned by Czech authorities who were afraid of his words – not a sword, not a gun. They were threatened by the speech of a poet. After the ruling politic fell, by way of the people heading out into the streets with candles, not with guns, Vaclav Havel was elected president.

We worship the God revealed in Jesus, the God who suffers death in order to bring new life, who meets our sin head on not with the power of retaliation but with the power of forgiveness and love. Throughout history, the Church has been at its best, followers of Jesus at their best, when it occurred to us that if we’re going to worship this God we’ve got to start living like this God. With courage, grace and forgiveness. In humility, generosity and joy. When we do, when we embrace the way of God’s foolishness and God’s weakness, there’ll be times we’ll think of ourselves as fools. Just a few verses later in the letter he wrote to the Christians in Corinth, that’s what Paul calls us, “fools for Christ’s sake.”

Jeff Wright

1 Newsweek, March 27, 2000
2 Thanks to Fred Craddock for his sermon about the cross as “reminder… of the cruelty and violence and sin in the world” and “the way the Christian life is”, from The Cherry Log Sermons, Chapter 14.